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By 1907, staff at the Tianjin YMCA were rallying their Chinese charges with the cry: When will China be able to send a winning athlete to the Olympic contests? When will China be able to invite all the world to Peking for an International Olympic contest? Nearly a century later, on the eve of China's first-ever Olympic games, this innovative book shows for the first time how sporting culture and ideology played a crucial role in the making of the modern nation-state in Republican China. A landmark work on the history of sport in China, Marrow of the Nation tells the dramatic story of how Olympic-style competitions and ball games, as well as militarized forms of training associated with the West and Japan, were adapted to become an integral part of the modern Chinese experience.

List of Tables Acknowledgments

Foreword by Joseph Alter

1. introduction

2. “now the fun of exercise can be realized”: from calisthenics and gymnastics ticao to sports tiyu in the 1910s

3. “mind, muscle, and money”: a physical culture for the 1920s

4. nationalism and power in the physical culture of the 1920s

5. “we can also be the controllers and oppressors”: social bodies and national physiques

6. elite competitive sport in the 1930s

7. from martial arts to national skills: the construction of a modern indigenous physical culture, 1912–37

8. tiyu through wartime and “liberation”

Glossary of Names Glossary of Terms Notes Bibliography Index

Andrew D. Morris is Associate Professor of History at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.

"This is the first book about how new ideas of sport and the body shaped the Chinese nation in its early formative years. It is a much-needed contribution toward understanding the origins of China's long quest to host the Olympic Games. This engaging book presents little-known material gleaned with great skill from archives in China, Taiwan, and the U.S. Informed by current theoretical debates, it pulls together in a sophisticated way the pieces of the complex relationship between the body and the nation in China, and it offers creative interpretations of this pivotal period in Chinese history."—Susan Brownell, author of Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People's Republic

"Andrew Morris gives us a clear and compelling account of the origins of modern sports in China. As reigning authority on the topic he is an ideal guide to the complexity and power of organized sports in Chinese social, cultural, and political life. An outstanding work that provides welcome historical background and invaluable insights in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics."—David Strand, author of Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s